Skip to main content

Emma Morin, Goodbye Swarm Lab!

Swarm Lab weeks 9 and 10


This is it. This is the end. My time working for the Swarm Lab has come to an end. I cannot believe 10 weeks have passed by so quickly. Where has the summer gone?! I'm moving straight from the lab on Friday to school on Monday, without so much as a break, so I am reasonably stressed out at the prospect of returning to the rigor of Peddie. At the lab, I work individually and go at my own pace, which is a very nice way to work. However, Peddie is the opposite, which is not a bad thing per se, it will just be a bit of an adjustment when I begin. The past two weeks in the lab have been wonderful, and the 10 vs. 1 experiments have progressed nicely. As I predicted, I will not be able to finish the 10 vs. 1 set, but I have set a good foundation for whoever will complete it. As I mentioned last time, there is a new girl in the lab, Shayna. At first, it took a little bit to get used to having another person in the lab with me. We would always bump into another, hog the tools, linger in the way for just too much time, but we soon got comfortable with one another and became friends, joking and laughing as we set up our respective experiments. We helped each other out and took the monotony out of running experiments. Both Dr. Garnier and Mr. Ray have expressed their disappointment that we will be unable to continue throughout the school year, and Mr. Ray told me that I would be welcome back to the lab if I ever wanted to do more research. On our final day, the 31st of August, Dr. Garnier and Mr. Ray took Shayna and I to the local bubble tea shop as a parting celebration. We talked about college and future aspirations and random funny stories. This may be my favorite memory. Dr. Garnier was always a figure who slightly frightened me, but seeing him drinking bubble tea and mimicking a fish frozen in ice completely erased that fear of him. Once we finished our drinks we walked back to campus. Dr. Garnier and Mr. Ray thanked us for our work in the lab once again, and I, having completed my work for the day, walked to the Light Rail station and began my commute home for the last time. I will be forever grateful to the Swarm Lab, NJIT's high school research program, and EXP for allowing me to participate in such an unforgettable experience. Having done research for an entire summer, I can now say with certainty that I want to pursue a career in a research field. My life will be forever impacted by this summer, and for that, I am extremely grateful.
I can't wait to share my work with everyone at Peddie on Science Night; it'll be a great "slime". Get it? Great time, great slime? I'll work on it for my presentation, alright? Bye!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been awaiting ligament, menisci, and cartilage tissue from a canine or human knee joint for (interleukin) IL-1B tissue culture. IL-1B is an inflammatory cytokine that has been proven to increase rates of tissue degeneration and osteoarthritis development in the Thompson Lab. Dr. Stoker wants me to experiment with different types of knee tissues in a co-culture with varying levels of this cytokine to determine its effects on the entire knee joint. This co-culture uses an insert permeable to the media to separate the two tissue samples from physical contact, while allowing them to share the same media. This creates an extremely accurate model for knee tissues in their native environment due to their exposure to the same synovial fluid in the joint. This model would then be treated with the IL-1B and cultured for 21 days. During these 21 days, the media would be collected every three days for biomarker evaluation at the end of the stu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...
3 comments
Read more